Boffins at Google are looking at ways of speeding up the internet. Not by making the underlying physical network faster, but by improving the efficiency of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that underpins the internet. This will have the benefit of making all networks that use the new improved version faster and being more scalable with improvements to the underlying physical network. The new TCP stack will be compatible with the old one by running alongside it and only kicking in when both client and server have it installed. This is currently implemented in the Linux kernel and is in the process of becoming the TCP standard.

There are four basic ways that they're looking at improving TCP: 1) Increase the number of TCP packets sent at the beginning of a TCP connection from three to ten. This reduces latency. 2) Reduce packet loss timeout from three seconds to one ie shorten the time between retries, which is more appropriate for modern high speed networks. 3) Use TCP Fast Open (TFO) a faster way for a web browser to initiate a connection with a website and 4) Use Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP (PRR) which is a more efficient way to deal with traffic congestion.

The research team are also looking at improved transmission recovery (data loss) in noisy mobile environments. Full technical details are available at the Google blog.

This is awesome, but lets look at the downers:
- Faster & More Powerful DDoS'
- Faster Timeouts

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There's another downer and believe me, it's gonna happen: since this will increase speed, some unscrupulous ISPs will throttle more agressively to reduce bandwidth consumption, giving no net benefit to the user. Only they see more profit as they can squeeze more customers into the same pipe.

And of course, those unscrupulous ISPs are the big ones too, so everyone's gonna suffer. :shadedshu

It depends. Could be much worse. For international sites, or small server sites, the faster timeouts might actually result in more pages/servers appearing dead. It is a two way street. The big servers will get better... the small or distant servers could arguable get worse.

There's another downer and believe me, it's gonna happen: since this will increase speed, some unscrupulous ISPs will throttle more agressively to reduce bandwidth consumption, giving no net benefit to the user. Only they see more profit as they can squeeze more customers into the same pipe.

And of course, those unscrupulous ISPs are the big ones too, so everyone's gonna suffer. :shadedshu

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People have to be willing to complain or a large group can file for a CAL.
Here in Canada, BELL Sympatico Internet as of March 2012 will no longer be throttled regardless how you use the net. This big WIN for customers came to be because enough of us complained.

People have to be willing to complain or a large group can file for a CAL.
Here in Canada, BELL Sympatico Internet as of March 2012 will no longer be throttled regardless how you use the net. This big WIN for customers came to be because enough of us complained.

Click to expand...

Wow, it's great to see that the little guy can still make a difference.

There's another downer and believe me, it's gonna happen: since this will increase speed, some unscrupulous ISPs will throttle more agressively to reduce bandwidth consumption, giving no net benefit to the user. Only they see more profit as they can squeeze more customers into the same pipe.

And of course, those unscrupulous ISPs are the big ones too, so everyone's gonna suffer. :shadedshu

Click to expand...

Comcast did this with their latest analog/digital network updates- increasing their capacity and passing not anything on to their customers